Cynthia Johnson, writing as Evelyn Richardson, fell in love with the Regency period when she first discovered “Pride and Prejudice” stuck at home on a snow day in junior high school. She has followed that interest through college (where she wrote her honors thesis on Fanny Burney) and graduate school, and continues to indulge herself with membership in the American Society for Eighteenth Century studies and writing Regency set historical novels.

Cynthia has also been a librarian and library administrator for many years, which is reflected in her meticulous period bibliography and lists of reference resources. Living in the Boston area, she has access to, and haunts (electronically or in person) several of the country’s major research libraries.

Each year at the Let Your Imagination Take Flight Conference, we present the Goldrick Service Award to a deserving New England Chapter member.

The Goldrick, first awarded in 1996, is given in honor of the late Bob Goldrick who, along with his wife Emma, wrote as Emma Goldrick for Harlequin. They were longtime chapter members who generously volunteered their time, knowledge, and help to the chapter and their fellow members. Upon his death, it was decided to create a service award that would annually celebrate a member whose contribution to the chapter exemplified the service and cooperation among fellow writers that so characterized Bob’s legacy.

The Board encourages the membership to nominate any member they feel promotes the best of what the chapter is about, in particular those who have given their time, energy, and emotional/mental stamina to the chapter, especially those unsung members who so quietly give of themselves. Current Board members are not eligible.

The Board will review all the nominations and choose a recipient. The award will be presented to the winner in a special presentation during the conference.. There is no formal nomination submission process for the award. You can simply email or mail your nominations to any member of the board. However, please include a detailed statement as to why you have nominated a particular member since this will help the Board during the selection process.

If you write historical romance, part of what you are selling is the chance to live in someone else’s skin. Maybe your character is Marianne, a half-Jamaican hotelier seduced by a spy during the Crimean War; or Laura, a diplomat’s daughter who rescues a wounded American Marine in the Boxer Rebellion. Either way, flat descriptions from encyclopedias won’t cut it. You need to mine primary sources for the convincing details of everyday life. Where else will you learn how Marianne chased off a thief with her rusty horse pistol, primed only with coffee? Or how Laura saved her favorite white pony from becoming dinner for starving Americans in Beijing? This workshop is designed to introduce the writer to primary sources: how to find them, how to assess their reliability, and how to keep track of the information within them. The emphasis will be on free resources found online, including books, memoirs, newspaper articles, magazines, maps, photographs, and note-taking software. Any period of study is possible, but the best online materials are found for the eighteenth through twentieth centuries, including Regency, Victorian, Edwardian, British India, and American Western periods.

Jennifer Hallock is the author of the Sugar Sun Series, historical romance set during the Philippine-American War. She has lived and worked in the Philippines, but she currently writes at her little brick house on a New England homestead—kept company by her husband, a growing flock of chickens, and two geriatric border collie mutts. She spends her days teaching history and her nights writing historical happily-ever-afters. Before the internet made it easy, Jen worked as a fact-checker for several academic publications. She also researched and published an article on human trafficking for a peer-reviewed journal. These days she teaches generations of history students how to write research papers, and she has even helped a handful of these teenagers get their own work published.

This year, agents and editors at our conference will be reading the five pages in which your hero and heroine meet. Even if you’re not pitching, this is a great chance to get some feedback on this important moment in your book. Bring five copies of the first five pages where the heroine meets the hero.

If POV is the camera lens through which we experience a story, then Deep POV is the extreme close up. In other words, the reader is just reading about your characters, she is experiencing the story’s events along with themas they unfold. When used correctly, this tool can bring added depth and emotion to your writing. But it’s not as easy as it sounds.

Join Barbara Wallace for a discussion about the various levels of POV and how deep Point of View can be used to enhance your stories. Be prepared to contribute as well, as everyone’s point of view is welcome.

Bestselling romance author Barbara Wallace started writing romance in 1993. She sold to Harlequin in 2010. Today she writes sweet romances for Harlequin Romance and Entangled Publishing. Her work has earned numerous awards including the Golden Heart, the Booksellers Best and New England Readers Choice Awards. When she’s not writing, you can find usually find her on Twitter @BarbaraTWallace talking about writing, her pets, the Boston Red Sox, evil butlers of Downton, her husband and/or her son Tattoo — not necessarily in that order.

Lisa Mondello spent fifteen years trying to get traction in traditional publishing, had some success writing for Avalon Books and Harlequin’s Love Inspired Romance line, but never fully getting there. She self published her first Indie book in September 2011 and hasn’t looked back. She will discuss how to get started in Indie, how to stay on track, how to avoid pitfalls, and how to navigate the ever changing Self Publishing world.

New York Times and USA TODAY Bestselling Author, Lisa Mondello, has held many jobs in her life but being a published author is the last job she’ll ever have. She’s not retiring! She blames the creation of the personal computer for her leap into writing novels. Otherwise, she’d still be penning stories with paper and pen. Her book The Knight and Maggie’s Baby is a New York Times Bestseller. Her popular series includes TEXAS HEARTS, DAKOTA HEARTS, Fate with a Helping Hand and the new SUMMER HOUSE series. Writing as LA Mondello, her romantic suspense, MATERIAL WITNESS, book 1 of her Heroes of Providence series made the USA TODAY Bestsellers List and was named one of Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2012. You can find more information about Lisa Mondello at lisamondello.blogspot.com

Prior to her writing career, author Jen Malone was the New England Head of Publicity and Promotions for 20th Century Fox and Miramax Films, charged with creating localized, grassroots campaigns to compliment the mass marketing efforts of the studio. In this seminar, Jen draws on those strategies to discuss outside-the-box techniques authors can employ to get their title noticed in a cluttered marketspace. We’ll examine why the target audience influences most of the marketing decisions and unique ways to specifically reach those readers. Finally you’ll be shown examples of marketing campaigns that managed to create that elusive “buzz” and examine ways you can do the same for your title!

Jen Malone writes books for tweens and teens, including At Your Service, the You’re Invited series, and the forthcoming The Sleepover with Simon & Schuster, as well as Map to the Stars and the forthcoming Wanderlost with HarperCollins. She is a former Hollywood marketing exec who once spent a year traveling the world solo, met her husband on the highway (literally), and went into labor with her identical twins while on a rock star’s tour bus. These days she saves the drama for her books. You can learn more about Jen and her titles at www.jenmalonewrites.com.

Are you confused when we talk about “voice” in writing? Editors say it’s what they’re looking for, and agents say it can make the difference between a mid-list and a best-selling career. It’s often defined as “a writer’s personality on the page,” but how do we put it there? Is it something natural, organic, or something related to our writing craft?

This workshop will explore the integrated writing elements that make up voice, such as style, tone, and content (each with its own sub-elements) and what choices we make that affect our voices. We’ll analyze recognizable samples of strong writing voices, and through discussion and exercises, map out some ways to strengthen our own voices for greater writing success.

Award-winning author Gail Eastwood started writing stories as soon as she learned to string words together on paper. After detours into journalism and rare books, she finally found her path writing “traditional” Regency romances acclaimed for pushing the genre’s boundaries with emotional depth and innovative plots. Published by Signet and twice nominated for Romantic Times Magazine’s Career Achievement award, Gail had to put writing on hold to deal with family health issues, but honed her teaching skills in the interim. Now she is back doing what she loves best, but still enjoys helping to nurture the writing gift in others. Most of her backlist is now available and she has new books in the works.